Contributors: February 2001

In 1964, when Fred Smith was the travel and ski editor for a struggling magazine called Sports Illustrated, he had an idea. Before the creation of the Super Bowl, nothing much happened in the sports world during mid-January. So Fred proposed writing a travel story on a warm resort destination and offhandedly added: “Perhaps we should take a pretty girl there and put her on the cover.” Those humble beginnings developed into the annual SI swimsuit edition, the best-selling single magazine issue in the world. In his tenure at SI, Fred reported on the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics and led the magazine’s coverage of the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. He also wrote dozens of resort profiles on new ski resorts that were opening in North America, including Sugarbush, Vt., Vail, Colo., and Snowmass, Colo. Now a freelance writer, Fred lives on Long Island and still skis 15 to 20 days a year. For this issue, he writes about one of his favorite European adventures in “All Aboard” on page 86.

Doug Sabanosh was enrolled at age 3 in the Snoopy Ski School at Sugarbush, Vt., and he never looked back. A top high-school ski racer in Connecticut, Doug nonetheless elected to attend college in Virginia to play lacrosse. A spring-break ski trip to the Rockies his freshman year interfered with that plan, and Doug immediately transferred to the University of Colorado. After graduation, he spent three seasons at Squaw Valley, Calif., working in a ski shop and teaching skiing. Doug joined SKI two years ago and now serves as the online coordinator for our new website, skimag.com. In his first season at the helm, Doug won the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award for an online story he wrote on skiing 24 Colorado resorts in four days. (Better yet, he parlayed that experience into a similar trip to ski the competing Utah resorts.) Doug is proud to have skied the past 64 consecutive months, though he is naïve to think that he’ll overtake SKI editor-in-chief Andy Bigford for the staff title of most days skied per season. Now get back to work, Doug.